Great Ideas of Science PDF
Preview Great Ideas of Science
^^^j^fl Asimov Great ideas of sc;ience PUBLIC LIBRARY FORT WAYNE AND ALLEN COUNTY, IND. Great Ideas of Science ISAAC ASIMOV Illustrated hy Lee Ames 1969 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON To Eric Berger who has always been cooperative FIRST PRINTING R © COPYRIGHT 1969 BY ISAAC ASIMOV ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS WORK MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING AND RECORDING, OR BY ANY INFORMATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL ^ SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 70-82476 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. CONTENTS 1588855 1 Thales and Science Itself 1 2 Pythagoras and Number 10 3 Archimedes and Applied 20 Mathematics 4 Galileo and Experimentation 29 5 Democritus and Atoms 36 6 Lavoisier and Gases 45 7 Newton and Inertia 55 8 Faraday and Fields 63 9 Rumford and Heat 71 10 Joule and Energy 80 11 Planck and Quanta 89 12 Hippocrates and Medicine 98 13 Wohler and Organic Chemistry 106 14 Linnaeus and Classification 114 15 Darwin and Evolution 122 16 Russell and Stellar Evolution 129 Index 13 8 1 Thales and Science Itself VA^HAT IS the universe composed of? About 600 B.C. the Greek thinker Thales (THAY- leez) asked himself that important question and came up with the ivrong answer: ''All things are water." This statement was not only incorrect, it was not even quite original. Yet it is one of the most important state- 2 Great Ideas ofScience — ments in the history of science. Without it or some- — thing Hke it there would be no science. The importance of Thales' answer will become clear if we first examine how he happened to hit upon it. Not surprisingly, this man who said that all things were water lived in a seaport. The city, Miletus (migh-LEE-tus) lay , on the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea, in what is now part of Turkey. Miletus no longer exists, but in 600 B.C. it was the most prosperous city in the Greek-speaking world. On Ancient Shores Perhaps Thales pondered the nature of the universe at the seashore, as he gazed at the Aegean. He knew that the Aegean opened southward into a still larger sea, now called the Mediterranean, which stretched hundreds of miles westward. The Mediterranean passed through a narrow strait (the Strait of Gibraltar) between two rocky prominences the Greeks called the Pillars of Hercules. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules lay an ocean (the Atlan- tic), and the Greeks thought it surrounded the world's land on all sides. Thales thought that the land was shaped like a disk a few thousand miles across and that it floated in an endless ocean. I
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